The Last Train to Zona Verde (41 page)

That was in Luanda, a few days after I had arrived from the road. The trip north from Benguela had started at five on a dark morning, at the bus station, as usual a bleak oily field. As we swung north toward Lobito, I noticed things I’d missed before: a huge new (Chinese-built) soccer stadium, a vanity project for a Pan-African tournament and a reminder of how many schools could have been built or improved with the money; a new (Chinese-built) airport, not yet opened; a new (Chinese-built) bridge over the Catumbela River; and the deepening of Lobito’s port, Chinese workers doing the dredging.

Farther on, the garbage and the sight of wrecked lives, people existing like castaways at Xilip, Cangulo, Sumbe, and Porto Amboim: the slum dwellers crowded and immobile like their own trash heaps. Why did they fling away all this garbage, fouling the very places they lived? Between the towns, the river valleys were green, still wooded, and most of the beaches empty, glittering scoops of looping bays and headlands, no fishing boats onshore, no boats at all, just the running carpet of yellow sand next to the glare of water.

The main road was narrow but straight and paved, and this symmetry created a greater danger than rutted, potholed gravel because it emboldened drivers to speed. The consequences littered the roadside — burned-out trucks, minivans, and crashed cars the whole way to Luanda. One of the most recent wrecks, I now knew, belonged to Rui’s daughter, Filipa.

Nine hours of this, with cows, goats, and dogs to steer around, and with stops. But a stop would be fifteen minutes in a muddy
courtyard of a coastal town, yellow sludge up to my ankles as I sloshed to the shack selling — what? Greasy bags of poxy fries and piles of flyspecked
frango
(“Which one,
senhor?
”) and no bananas. And a chat with Agostinho.

“What your country?” was a question I could answer, but “You tourist?” was a hard one.

I said, “I don’t know.”

“You business?”

“No business.”

“You teacher?”

“Sometimes.”

He poked me in the chest with a big blunt finger and laughed, saying, “Why you come here?”

“To see this,” I said. I pointed to the heaps of garbage, the market women squatting against their baskets of bruised fruit and fanning away flies, the children whining for food, the rapper boys, the beaten dogs, the bullet-scarred shop fronts, the stacks of pirated DVDs, the strangely overdressed girls in tight slacks and curly gleaming hair extensions, eyeing me with disapproving pouty faces.

And Agostinho welcomed me in the national language.

I was surprised to see the wide empty beaches. Perhaps close-up they would look as befouled as the towns, but at this distance, seen from the higher coast road, they appeared wave-washed and clean and desolate. In Luanda I was to meet a young, athletic Portuguese diplomat who told me that on most weekends he drove down the coast to surf the waves here at Cabo Ledo and Cabo de São Bráz. He surfed alone, he never saw other surfers.

From the coast, some inland stretches were green, villages showing through the trees, some of them clusters of small thatched huts, others tracts of one-room cinderblock houses with tin roofs. Areas of the landscape had been burned out or deeply eroded, and looked blasted by time and the elements (and artillery shells), but no matter what lay inland, the seashore beneath the sloping hills was lovely
— remained lovely, probably, because it was uninhabitable. No one could live on or near the beach. Nothing would grow in the sand. The water was undrinkable. The traditional knack for small-scale sea fishing had apparently been lost.

In the afternoon we crossed the Kwanza, a wide river for which the Angolan unit of currency is named (
kwanza
, a Kimbundu word, should not be confused with the Swahili word
kwanzaa
, meaning “first”). The bridge over the Kwanza had been blown up many times and was being improved again — Chinese design, Chinese laborers, Chinese money.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was a significant boundary, the river somewhat mystical for Angolans, a setting of myths and folktales and many battles. The land surrounding the Kwanza seemed almost idyllic. But not long after we passed it — thirty miles from the capital — the Luanda blight began. Soon there were no trees, only shacks and people and bare soil. The blight was not simply the small shacks, cement-block houses, roadside dumps, and stricken villages sitting in a sea of mud; blight was also evident in the new, larger cement structures, unfinished or abandoned or vandalized and sitting in seas of mud.

What appeared to be a modest building boom was in reality cutthroat opportunism, random and shoddily put-together real estate ventures — ugly houses and grotesque skeletal structures projected to be hotels. Why would anyone stay in these hideous buildings surrounded by slum huts? The building boom had been outstripped by the growth of squatter camps, hillsides of shacks. Buildings were rising, but slums were also growing — the buildings vertically, the slums horizontally. Like the South African pattern of migration, people from rural areas kept coming — the burgeoning shantytowns outstripping any slum improvements, the low mean city of new arrivals visibly sprawling.

In a bus that stopped in traffic for twenty minutes at a time, and with the continual dropping off of passengers, I thought I must be
near the center of Luanda, so I got off with some other riders. The place was called Benfica, a district of heavy traffic and ugly buildings, stinking of dust and diesel fumes. Africa, yes, but it was also a version of Chechnya and North Korea and coastal derelict Brazil, places without a single redeeming feature, places to escape from.

As I stood at the roadside, tasting the grit, a small car intending to avoid the clogged traffic sped past, banged into a road divider, flew sideways, and, deformed by the crash, swerved off the road. A man with a bloody face and hands pushed the driver’s side door open and, seeing him, bystanders laughed. The bloody-faced man staggered, his arms limp, his mouth agape, like a zombie released from a coffin. He was barefoot. No one went to his aid. He dropped to his knees and howled.

“
Idiota,”
a man next to me said, and spat in the dust.

I became conscious of entering a zone of irrationality. Going deeper into Luanda meant traveling into madness. Everything looked crooked or improvisational, with a vibration of doomsday looming. I would have been happy to get on a bus going in the opposite direction, but I had a dutiful sense of needing to follow through on my plans, continuing north into the insanity.

Many places I’d been in the bush — Tsumkwe or Grootfontein or Springbok — had been described as “nowhere.” Yet that was not how I saw them. They were distinctly themselves, isolated though they might be, settlements with a peculiar look—the look of home. But this Benfica was the very embodiment of nowhere, and on the way to nowhere, the twitching decrepitude of urban Africa. Standing next to the sheet-metal shop, the blowing dust, the big trucks and fumes, the noise and the heat, I thought how this was in microcosm the whole of the city experience in most of Africa, though up to now I had avoided facing the fact. And at that point I hadn’t yet seen the full extent of Luanda’s awfulness.

From the immensity of the slums, the disrepair of the roads, and
the randomness of the building, I could tell that the government was corrupt, predatory, tyrannical, unjust, and utterly uninterested in its people — fearing them for what they saw, hating them for what they said or wrote. Though the regime was guilty of numerous human rights violations, it was not outwardly a politically oppressive place. The police were corrupt, but casually so — Angola was too busy with its commercial extortions to be a police state. It was a government of greed and thievery, determined to exclude anyone else from sharing, and Angolan officialdom had an obsession with controlling information.

I knew of many instances when investigative journalists were arrested for doing their jobs — two of them around the time I was in Luanda. In one case, a print journalist, Koqui Mukuta, was beaten and locked up for reporting on a peaceful demonstration, and twenty of the activists were also arrested. In another example, a radio journalist, Adão Tiago, was jailed for reporting episodes of “mass fainting,” possibly caused by the release of toxic industrial fumes. But the Angolan government does not actively persecute the majority of its people; it is a bureaucracy that impoverishes them by ignoring them, and is indifferent to their destitution and inhuman living conditions.

A society of shakedowns and opportunism is inevitably a society of improvisation. That came across vividly in Luanda: the improvised bridge or road, the improvised hut or shelter, the improvised government, the improvised excuse. Angola was a country without a plan, a free-for-all driven by greed. It was hard to travel through the country and not feel that the place was cursed — not cursed by its history, as observers often said, but cursed by its immense wealth.

A sense of hopelessness had weighed me down like a fever since I’d stepped across the border weeks before. And with this fever came a vision that had sharpened, coming into greater focus, as if inviting me to look closer. My first reaction was a laugh of disgust
at the ugliness around me, like the reek of a latrine that makes you howl or the sight of a dirty bucket of chicken pieces covered with flies. After the moment of helpless hilarity passed, what remained was the vow that I never wanted to see another place like this.

The xenophobia that characterizes Angolan officialdom in the remote provinces, small towns, and coastal cities is the prevailing mood in the capital, where hatred of outsiders seemed intense. Individually Luandans were friendly enough, sometimes crazily so, screeching their meaningless hellos. Nancy Gottlieb, in Benguela, saw this as “happy, laughing, energetic, smiling,” but it seemed to me nearer to frenzy. In crowds they pushed and jostled with the mercilessness of a mob, and anyone with a uniform or a badge or any scrap of authority was unambiguously rude or downright menacing.

Friendliness is helpful to a stranger, yet I could manage without it. Being frowned upon or belittled is unpleasant, but not a serious inconvenience — no writer or traveler is a stranger to hostile or unwarranted criticism. But xenophobia of the sort I found in Luanda, and on an official scale, institutionalized alien-hating, was something new to me. It seemed odd to be disliked for being a stranger, and while the foreigners I met in the capital had their own explanations for this behavior (slavery, colonialism, civil war, the class system, tribalism, poverty, the cold-hearted oil companies) and had ways to cope with it, I found it inconvenient to be so conspicuous and developed a general aversion to being despised.

Luanda was a surprise because it had been to me, like much of Angola, a foreign land without a face. The reason for this silence or absence of description was that the Angolan government severely restricts the entry of foreign journalists, pretending to be contemptuous, accusing them, in their favorite buzzword of paranoia, of spreading
confusão;
outsiders disrupting the smooth back-and-forth of bureaucratic thievery. But contempt was the wrong word — contempt is inspired by superiority. A truer word was fear; politicians
and businessmen alike were terrified of being found out, of anyone telling the truth about this corrupt country.

When Luanda does get into the news, it is usually a hooting headline to the effect that the city is practically unaffordable to foreigners: “The most expensive city in Africa!” The
Economist
, the BBC, and other media outlets have run such stories, with grotesquely colorful details, about the unreasonable sums you had to pay to get very little, which caused expatriates to complain. The people who suffered most from Luanda’s high cost of living were not the expatriates but, of course, the urban poor, the people huddled in the
musseques
. They were mainly a silent class. Not a sullen class, though; Luanda’s slums were characterized by blaring music and high spirits bordering on hysteria.

And when I heard of the foreign expatriate couple who paid many thousands of dollars for a tiny room in which the electricity often failed, or hundreds of dollars for a modest restaurant meal, I suspected that they were obliquely boasting, because what kept them in Luanda were their huge salaries. “My rent is seven thousand dollars a month,” an expatriate in the oil industry told me. “And there are people who pay eight thousand a month who don’t have water half the time.” The only reason foreigners came to the city was to make money, and they stayed because their salaries kept growing as oil profits increased. Oil production figures had just been revised upward, output approaching two million barrels a day, at $100 a barrel: a billion dollars of gross revenue every five days, an almost unimaginable cash flow.

Luanda was a hardship post — it had been that way throughout its history — but it had become a boomtown based on oil. No traveler had ever praised Luanda in its poor days of the past, but it was much the worse more recently for its wealth: the bad restaurants where it was impossible to get a table, the stinking bars where it was hard to order a drink, the expensive neighborhoods with potholed streets, the traffic jams in which people sat for hours in their unmoving
BMWs, Mercedes, or Hummers — I saw more bulky, overpriced Hummers in an average day in Luanda than I saw in a month in the States. Or the bad hotels where locals said I’d be lucky to get a room.

I found my way to the city center, and at the reception desk of a newish but already seedy hotel I was told they might be able to fit me in for three nights. I thanked the clerk for her hospitality.

Unsmiling, being busy, looking away from me, she said, “Pay in advance. Three nights. That will be eleven hundred dollars. Cash please. No credit cards.”

“And you might not have hot water,” came a teasing voice behind me.

I had no alternative. The whole of Luanda was a convergence of oil and mining interests, vying for the city’s few hotels and restaurants (and prostitutes). The guests at my hotel were foreign workers in the national industries — some rough types in old clothes, especially rowdy in the evening, and the slicker, nastier-looking operators of all nationalities in their new suits, making deals in oil, diamonds, and gold. The words “oil, diamonds, and gold” have such allure, and suggest glitter and wealth in a fabled city fattening on its profits. But this was not the case. The city was joyless, as improvisational as its slums — hot and chaotic, inhospitable and expensive, grotesque and poor.